Technical Field
An exemplary embodiment relates to an apparatus and method for providing a community service, and more particularly, to a community service providing apparatus and method that make it possible to easily notice relationships among various pieces of content and the importance of content.
Description of the Related Art
An on-line community service provides a forum such that netizens can produce and share information by themselves and gather for activities.
As a typical on-line community service, an on-line society network is a social network service (SNS), denoting an on-line community, such as a society, a club, an Internet forum, a mini homepage, and a blog.
In an existing community service, a great number of comments and replies are sorted by only date or the number of recommendations, and thus there is a limit to showing relationships among various pieces of content. In other words, it is difficult to notice relationships among pieces of content and to determine which piece of content is a mainstream or a non-mainstream.
Korean Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2011-0125587 discloses a method of providing an SNS and a service providing server to which the method is applied. In the disclosed method, the intimacy between writing users is determined based on the users' frequencies of writing, numbers of posts, the lengths of posts, etc., in a thread consisting of original posts and comments, and users are selectively provided with rights to read or related content, a recommended identification (ID), etc., accordingly.
However, it is still difficult to notice relationships among various pieces of content and the importance of content at a glance.